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The Zen of Steve Jobs

By

Jeff Yang

Oct 6, 2011 5:33 pm ET

Moments after his passing was announced, the world had already begun to mourn Steve Jobs — a man who changed the world as often as some people change their hairstyles.

He’s being celebrated as an innovator, a visionary and a revolutionary. Yet in his life, critics labeled him a self-involved egotist, a shameless huckster, a ruthless manipulator. His closest friends and allies, even Jobs himself, might agree that both sets of labels were accurate — the external manifestations of an idiosyncratic worldview that has defied interpretation by scores of would-be analysts, in part because at its heart was an Asian philosophy that embraces nuance, contradiction and paradox.

I’ve written before about how the study of Zen Buddhism shaped Jobs’s design sensibility and business philosophy. Jobs was a passionate advocate of what Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind” — an outlook free of the learned constraints that lead to preconceived solutions to problems. He preached and practiced the need for radical simplicity and rigorous focus, both of which are core Buddhist values. And he was a deep believer in the validity of Japanese traditional aesthetics, whose precepts are deeply intertwined with the ideas and practice of Zen.